Paul Hopkins: Any day now, and it could be you
Fifteen years ago, my heart was broken. And, as I peered at myself closely in the misted mirror, drawing the cold blade once more across the soaped-up skin, I felt like the condemned man, having his last shave — to be clean before his Maker — and about to have his last meal, choking on his own self-pity in the hope of a last-minute reprieve.
"Please God, let it be all right," I said to no one in particular as I rinsed the razor under the running water.
I was heading for open heart surgery to mend a congenital defect which in mid-life had caught up with me and also to mend the peg on the mitral valve. Fifteen years ago I was 15 weeks in recovery with a serrated scar the length of my chest.
Just before Christmas my cardiac consultant told me the peg on the mitral valve needed mending because of wear and tear. The date is set for next month. This time around though I'll be back on my feet in days, given the marvellous, and non-invasive, mechanics of micro-surgery.
I mention all this because I caught the first episode of RTE's new documentary Any Given Day, set against the Accident & Emergency unit of University Hospital Cork (UHC). It's an insightful fly-on-the-wall look at the day-t0-day running of the unit where death can often hang in the balance, dependent on the skill and knowledge of the emergency team. Judging by the opening episode, it's promising and I look forward to its full run, although I did wonder where were the trolleys we hear so much about.
I am a bit of a nerd when it comes to streaming series on cops and crime and also the goings-on in a hospital. Down the years I have watched everything from the grainy black-and-white days of Emergency Ward 10 to Casualty to Gray's Anatomy, and latterly Code Black. What makes this drama stand out for me is that not all ends well, all the time. A lot of things go wrong. A lot of patients die.
Code Black feels authentic in mirroring the facts of life, in that life can be fleeting and tenuous and end in an abrupt moment... any given day.
We all die, naturally, but, in the intervening years between coming and going, most of us at some time will need the professionalism of medics in the confines of a hospital room.
There is nothing like a few days stay in a hospital bed to jolt one back to a sense of reality about the body’s susceptibility to illness, to a sense of one’s own mortality. Suffice to say, the conditions of my ins and outs of hospitals in the last 15 years were wholly treatable in the hands of professional healers and the miracle of modern medicine.
At all times, in public and private admissions, I have been surrounded by very special people, from consultants to surgeons to registrars to anaesthetists, to specialist nurses and nurses’ aides, down to the trolley men and tea ladies — and more caring and patient people I have yet to come across. The kindness of strangers.
Of course, you don’t need me telling you this. Many of you at some time will experience a stay in hospital, or have been by the side of a relative or friend who is in such care. These special people look after those of us in need. But, unless we have the misfortune to need them, we hardly ever give them a second thought.
One vignette of many I witnessed during my times in hospital brought home to me the goodness and kindness of these unsung heroes. I shared a ward with five other men, among them a gentleman who spoke no English. He was bed-bound and his toilet had resorted to incontinence that surely must have been draining his dignity.
One night, in those darkest hours when one finds oneself awake and thinking of all things about the body’s vulnerability and such, this man was in great distress and a young nurse came to his assistance. And, with the utmost gentleness and patience, she looked after him, tended to his most intimate needs, and brought her professionalism to the fore to ease his troubled mind.
The patient was a stranger in a strange land, and yet here was this young nurse showing the utmost love and compassion. An angel among us...